My Face for the World to See Read online

  ALFRED HAYES (1911–1985) was born into a Jewish family in Whitechapel, London, though his father, a barber, trained violinist, and sometime bookie, moved the family to New York when Hayes was three. After attending City College, Hayes worked as a reporter for the New York American and Daily Mirror and began to publish poetry, including “Joe Hill,” about the legendary labor organizer, which was later set to music by the composer Earl Robinson and recorded by Joan Baez. During World War II Hayes was assigned to a special services unit in Italy; after the war he stayed on in Rome, where he contributed to the story development and scripts of several classic Italian neorealist films, including Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), and gathered material for two popular novels, All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), the latter the basis for the 1953 film Act of Love, starring Kirk Douglas. In the late 1940s Hayes went to work in Hollywood, writing screenplays for Clash by Night, A Hatful of Rain, The Left Hand of God, Joy in the Morning, and Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, as well as scripts for television. Hayes was the author of seven novels, a collection of stories, and three volumes of poetry. In addition to My Face for the World to See, NYRB Classics publishes In Love.

  DAVID THOMSON is film critic at The New Republic and has been a frequent contributor to Sight & Sound, Film Comment, The Guardian, and The Independent. He is the author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film and, most recently, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies. He has also written several novels, including Suspects and Silver Light.

  MY FACE FOR THE

  WORLD TO SEE

  ALFRED HAYES

  Introduction by

  DAVID THOMSON

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1958 by Alfred Hayes; copyright renewed © 1986 by Marietta Hayes and Alan Hayes

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by David Thomson

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Saul Leiter, Sleep, c. 1955; © Saul Leiter; courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Hayes, Alfred, 1911–1985.

  My face for the world to see / by Alfred Hayes ; introduction by David Thomson.

  pages ; cm. — (New York review books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-667-2 (alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3515.A9367M9 2013

  813'.52—dc23

  2013008975

  eISBN 978-1-59017-694-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  MY FACE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31

  INTRODUCTION

  THE MAN is at a beach party in Los Angeles, bored by the event and inclined to look at the ocean—“There it was, exactly as advertised,” he notes, and then a girl, a pretty girl, comes into view. She wears shorts, a Basque shirt, and a yachting cap, and she’s carrying a drink. “Her legs glimmered a little in the darkness.” As she walks into the sea she seems to be in control. But then a wave floors her—“She really went under.” He goes in to save her, and that night he manages to be the hero even if his pants are ruined. But there’s no salvation in the long run, not for her, not for him. In the course of this terse novel, they neither of them acquire or deserve names.

  My Face for the World to See was published in 1958, when Alfred Hayes was forty-seven. Born in London, he had left for the United States as a young child and in 1943 was drafted into the American army, and that’s how he had been to Italy where he contributed to the scripts of two famous neorealist movies, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Then he came back to America and wrote his most successful novel, The Girl on the Via Flaminia, published in 1949. For the next ten years, he was kept busy in Hollywood and, with or without credit, worked on a series of interesting pictures—Teresa, for Fred Zinnemann; The Lusty Men, by Nicholas Ray; two films for Fritz Lang, Clash by Night and Human Desire; Island in the Sun, an interracial love story that was big at the box office; A Hatful of Rain, an early study of drug addiction, taken from a play by Michael V. Gazzo; The Barbarian and the Geisha, a John Huston picture, starring John Wayne, about Japan in the nineteenth century.

  Hayes was comfortable, though that’s not the same as pleased. The man in this novel seems a success, too, but he has no self-respect. When the girl asks him if he’s writing at one of the studios now, “I said I wasn’t, really; I was writhing.” This girl has been saved from suicide, but the man has his own settled, established disquiet. He is earning “a salary somewhat in excess of what they paid an aged vice- president of a respectable bank.” But he is unconvinced by such credentials. After all, Hayes was a poet (he wrote “Joe Hill”), a novelist of clenched power and dismay, and a man fairly certain that the advertised benefits—the ocean, the movie happiness, marriage—didn’t work out.

  The man has left his wife and a cold marriage in New York, but the forlorn girl walking into the Pacific hardly surprises him. “At this very moment,” he says,

  the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous if they weren’t already famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy, or wealthier if they were. . . . There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them.

  Hayes is the dry poet of the things we think about while lying in bed, when sleep refuses to carry us off. As this novel begins, the man seems in the superior position. He is older than the girl; he has a career; he watches her and the ocean from an upper balcony. Then he asks if she’d like to have dinner—she is pretty—and soon enough, the words will slip out of him, the unfelt, “I love you,” rather as he might have someone say that in a movie script. Isn’t that the kind of thing people are supposed to say? Moreover, the girl is a failure. Hoping to act, she does only auditions, and the tenuousness of her personality suggests the ordeals she may have faced at those occasions. She has been ill. She has a shrink who is holding off billing her until she makes it. When the lover takes her to a bullfight in Tijuana (a magnificent, remorseless scene) she is emotionally devastated.

  One night as they are in bed together in his house, he watches her asleep. She is moaning, grinding her teeth. She cries out, “No, no.” He decides their affair is a mistake.

  I thought: she shouldn’t sleep with anybody if she doesn’t wish them to know her secrets. It was something more than her nakedness: more than the exhaustion after love. She was in the bed as she would be in a ditch or a field. She slept like someone who could not go any further and had already come too far. I stretched myself out beside her, a stranger, a spy, sharing the warmth of the bed. Morning seemed
immeasurably far.

  But then the man falls asleep and when he wakes up the girl is gone. At six o’clock she got up, dressed, and walked the streets searching for a taxi. This seems like another facet of her neurosis, and later the man asks why she did such a thing. They are talking on the phone and he thinks he is exploring her problems. But suddenly she tells him she was frightened.

  What frightened her, he wants to know.

  It was him.

  “In your sleep. . . . Don’t you know? You screamed out, several times; and cursed; and then once you began to cry. . . . You seemed to be suffering, and it was awful: the way you cursed. There must be someone, or something, you hate very much.”

  It’s such an economical revelation, and the proof that no one knows enough in Hayes’s world. We all cry out in our sleep. Yet still these people have no names. It’s a simple withholding, a withering eloquence, and it’s almost as if the inevitable disaster of the story is being guarded against by the lovers never quite being registered or given the ego of names. The novel is only 130 pages. You can read it quickly if you have the stomach for it, yet you know it’s slipping downhill. You want to wonder if it might have been prompted by a real incident, but Hayes writes without sentimentality, special pleading, or any faith in forgiveness. It’s a love story that is wary of using the word “love,” and it is so removed from the constant, hysterical romance of Hollywood in the 1950s. You can see how a man like Hayes might have written this book without ever mentioning it to anyone in the town or its business.

  I find the title mysterious, because in so many ways this is a story about an emotional cover-up. Though it is written in the first person, and lacks little in candor, it has the conviction that such matters should be buried. So if you read the book now, I think you may feel how far it cuts across the declaratory or boastful grain of better-known books from the 1950s, not just Norman Mailer but the kind of big novels of that era that he set up against himself in the heavyweight championship of the novel.

  A lot of Hayes’s writing turns inward. He likes long paragraphs that seem intent on mining their way towards some bleak but inward point. He does not often bother to notice the larger world or its solemn issues, and he is drawn time and again to solitude and loneliness. There is no rapture in this love story. The two people are never convinced of it, or deluded by hope. Yet, more than fifty years later, Hayes strikes me as more interesting and honest than so many of those famous novelists of the era. That was perhaps the last age in which novelists reckoned they had a chance of being important public figures, sorting out our Truths. Hayes took it for granted that he was only “writhing,” so he eliminated all the obvious Hollywood set pieces (some of which are very entertaining in Mailer’s The Deer Park). The action stays imprisoned in wretched apartments that resist any hint of home, a few clubs or restaurants, or at the beach.

  Alfred Hayes died in 1985. His screenwriting lasted through the ’70s and he wrote several episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour for television. He was twice nominated for an Oscar (Paisà and Teresa), yet it is time we recognized him as the author of two novels no reader will easily forget. But it is embedded in Hayes’s view of the world that there is neither justice nor redemption. Just admitting what happened.

  —DAVID THOMSON

  MY FACE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

  1

  IT WAS a party that had lasted too long; and tired of the voices, a little too animated, and the liquor, a little too available, and thinking it would be nice to be alone, thinking I’d escape, for a brief interval, those smiles which pinned you against the piano or those questions which trapped you wriggling in a chair, I went out to look at the ocean.

  There it was, exactly as advertised, a dark and heavy swell, and far out the lights of some delayed ship moving slowly south. I stared at the water, across a frontier of a kind, while behind me, from the brightly lit room with its bamboo bar and its bamboo furniture, the voices, detailing a triumph or recounting a joke, of those people who were not entirely strangers and not exactly friends, continued. It seemed silly to stay, tired as I was and the party dying; it seemed silly to go, with nothing home but an empty house.

  Below me, there was the beach; and now a girl came out of one of the bedrooms downstairs, dressed in a pair of shorts and a basque shirt, with a yachting cap on her head, and carrying in her hand a cocktail glass. She moved carefully and gaily out over the sand, balancing the glass, with the store-bought captain’s hat on her dark hair, and I could see her in the light coming from the house. Her legs had, in the very tight shorts, and in the darkness, a special whiteness. She went down to the edge of the surf and very deliberately there took a long drink from the glass and cocked her head a little to look at the stars. It made quite a picture: the sea, the shorts, the cocktail, and I assumed she was perfectly aware of the composition; but then, so was I, lingering out here on the porch, smoking a carefully meditative cigarette. I thought I’d seen her before somewhere: at least I’d seen the white legs, the long hair, the jaunty cap before; posed, sometimes, against the sail of a sloop at Balboa on a crowded weekend, or sitting up on a stool at the bar about four o’clock in the afternoon at Ocean House, if you were a member and had a cabaña, and the odds were she wasn’t. She’d been invited there, to Ocean House, as she’d been invited aboard that sloop in Balboa, and not usually alone; usually, there were three or four other girls, whose legs were equally long, and whose hair curled at the shoulders just so. I couldn’t see her face, but it didn’t matter: I was sure who she was, more or less, and I was sure she was experiencing, out there, with the water curled about her ankles, some divine rapport with the sea. Then, holding the glass, as though she were holding a chalice of some kind, in a private ceremony, she began to walk into the ocean. Her legs glimmered a little in the darkness. She paused to drink again, deliberately, from the glass, and then the undertow did something to the sand she was on and she fell. That delighted me. The little rump was now thoroughly wet, and the yachting cap was off her head. She stood up, confronting the Pacific, not making now quite the fascinating silhouette she had presented to the indifferent sky a few minutes before. She looked now a thoroughly discomfited nymph. I leaned down, my elbows on the railing of the small porch, enjoying her disaster. I was somewhat sick of all of them: their casual denims, and beachcombing sneakers, and t-shirts; their ginghams and halters and sandals; their candors and all their sunburned charms.

  The girl wavered a little now, with the cap gone and the cocktail glass at sea, and then she began to walk deeper into the ocean. She was pushing out into the water now, and she evidently wasn’t, as I had thought, wading. A big breaker came in and she went under. She really went under. I shouted something and jumped off the porch.

  2

  ON THE sand she coughed and tried to retch. Saliva hung out of her mouth, and there was seaweed clinging to her legs. She kept trying to speak. They’d come out of the house now, and I kept her down on the sand with difficulty and I straddled her and tried to pump the water out. I felt rather silly, and the position was obscene, and the damn sand was all over my slacks, and then the two cocker spaniels started to bark thinking it was some sort of game. Finally, she vomited. It all came up, the salt water and the gin and the food she’d had, a mess. She wasn’t pretty at all. It was a nuisance, and ugly. Of course, the dogs had to come over and smell it.

  But at least she could breathe now; or rather, wheeze.

  They wrapped her in blankets and took her into the house and put her close to the fire and gave her a cup of hot coffee. Nobody seemed too intensely upset. I got the impression they more or less expected climaxes like these at the parties they gave.

  “Who brought her?”

  “Benson, wasn’t it? She’s going to taste salty for a week.”

  “Somebody ought to put a picket fence around that ocean. It’s a public menace.”

  “Look at the poor thing shiver.”

  “Shut those dogs up.”

  She looked like a litt
le girl now, the face washed of all color. She was shivering uncontrollably; and she crouched in front of the fire, with the blanket about her, as though waiting to be scolded, and waiting to be punished. I felt sorry for her, and obscurely annoyed; besides, I hadn’t been conveniently wearing shorts. I said to Charlie: “Christ, when you do invite me to a party, this happens.”

  He shook his head. “A kid like that. She’s probably been at the martinis too much.”

  “Sure.”

  “They just don’t know how to drink.”

  “Next party you invite me to, I’ll carry a respirator.”

  I went upstairs to borrow a pair of Charlie’s pants and a sweatshirt to drive home in.

  3

  HOME WAS an apartment I’d rented on the boulevard. It wasn’t bad: a little too bridal, perhaps; the girl I’d taken it from had gone off to Europe to forget an unsuccessful marriage which had been followed by an apparently unsuccessful divorce. The apartment was something she’d put together between husbands, and it was, in a way, quite a little love nest. There was a small bar off the living room with two upholstered bar stools, and on the wall over the bar there were large bullfight posters she’d brought back with her from Mexico City. I gathered it was in Mexico City the marriage had been unsuccessful, and that the husband she had gone to Europe to forget had been a Mexican. She had implied that the husband hadn’t quite forgiven her for being a gringa, and in Mexico was rather ashamed of having an American for a wife, despite all the efforts she had made to conform to his idea of what a wife, married to a Mexican, should be. It was apparently, from what she had told me, a love affair that had been quite exciting in the States, and a complete failure in Mexico City. At any rate, she’d set the apartment up, cozy and excessively frilled, and had done the bedroom all in white, a white chenille spread and white curtains and even the alarm clock white, and fixed the bar up, with the bullfight pictures and tiny Chianti bottles in their wicker skirts hanging from the molding below the ceiling, and a couch with a great many cushions apparently to lie down on when the bar stools became uncomfortable, and she tried to forget the marriage as well as the divorce. But from the evidence it hadn’t worked, despite the décor and the lavishly bridal effect she gave the apartment, so she’d gone off to Europe with six months’ rent I’d given her in advance, and now I slept in the bed she’d probably had great hopes of. One of the additional imaginative touches she’d given the place was to thrust into the bull’s hump on the poster directly over the bar two banderillas which were sustained by nearly invisible threads from the ceiling. It made, all in all, for quite picturesque living, the bridal business in the bedroom and the lithographed bulls with those poniards sticking out of them off the living room, and the nearly complete collection of cold creams and deodorants in the medicine cabinet. It had, though, the disadvantage of striking me, when I was in a bad mood, as murderously cute, and of, now and then, urging me to reconstruct those inevitable scenes which must have transpired when my landlady had tried desperately to get over her marital sorrows. The walls of the apartment weren’t precisely thick: I could hear the couple upstairs, a thin angular Russian who was the maître d’ at a balalaika restaurant and who had a wife with immense gold hoops in her ears; or the publicity man next door, in front of whose apartment an alarming pile of unread newspapers had a tendency to collect; and in the rear, two girls, both blonde, both fresh-looking, who worked in an aircraft factory and shared a place together. These composed the tenants I was able to glimpse now and then. I never did find out who the other inhabitants of the building were; I could hear fragments of them; their ice cubes clinking, the exhausts of their cars, or, late at night, a more or less casual goddamn as somebody broke something. They weren’t particularly evasive, nor did they make any particular effort to seclude themselves: there was just something invisible, I found, about everybody who lived in the town.